If Obamacare worked like a well oiled machine, it would be a terrible drag on the economy. It is worse than that, however. Obamacare is in total disarray and coming apart at the seams. The implementation of its rules without an ability to properly function will be national disaster.

For example….

· The temporary “high risk” pools that Obamacare created, to provide a way for those with pre-existing health conditions to get insurance immediately, are undersubscribed yet way over budget. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the $5 billion allocated to these pools could enroll 200,000 consumers. They envisioned enrollment growing to more than 400,000. But only 77,877 have signed up as of July, yet the program is way over its budget. More than a quarter of these state-based risk pools are short on cash.

· The CLASS Act, which was supposed to provide consumers government-financed long-term care insurance has been abandoned, blowing an $86 billion dollar hole in Obamacare’s cost estimates. The CLASS Act was never financially viable. Its costs would have outstripped revenue as soon as it was in full operation. But since it took in money five years before it started to pay out benefits, budget gimmickry let Mr. Obama capture that revenue and use it to finance Obamacare. In abandoning the measure, the President’s own health secretary called the scheme “unsustainable.”

· The crown jewel of Obamacare’s effort to contain healthcare costs, the creation of Accountable Care Organizations, is so unwieldy that major provider groups have said they won’t participate. The idea is to consolidate doctors, turning them into employees of large systems, and then pay these systems lump sums of money to take care of groups of patients. A letter from 10 major medical groups that previously ran similar programs said, “it would be difficult, if not impossible” to accept the financial design created by Obamacare. In another rebuke, an umbrella group representing premier medical organizations said 90 percent of its members wouldn’t partake.

· New regulations Obamacare puts on insurers have been so unworkable that the Obama team has had to dole out 1,231 waivers. These exemptions are granted when the Obamacare rules are projected to raise healthcare premiums more than 10 percent, or create a “significant decrease in access to healthcare benefits.” These waivers haven’t been doled out consistently. Entities winning the preferences are over-represented by plans offered by unionized businesses and other administration allies.

· Obamacare can’t even settle on an affordable definition to the term “affordable” — creating the prospect that millions of middle class families will get priced out of coverage. According to a recent editorial in the New York Times, “the people left in the lurch would be those who had lower incomes but were not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.” Because of the way Obamacare defines what’s “affordable” to these families, many working-class people would be unable to afford family coverage offered by their employers, and yet they would not qualify for subsidies provided by the law.

The arrogance and hubris of these people is stunning. The idea that they could just rework a system that operates on a hundred million individual decisions a day and expect it to work is just astounding. Of course it won’t work.

The reporting will necessarily require that square pegs of data be forced into the round holes of government bureaucracy and will be worse than useless.

It will be all restrictions and insanity inducing Soviet style centralized bureaucracy without virtually any attending benefits.

The horror of its failure will have even its staunchest opponents begging them to fix it. It is going to be hell and the reason is the arrogance and hubris of a political class that overestimates their effectiveness by several orders of magnitude.